What We Learned About AI in Venues (From the industry who’s using It)
Published: July 1, 2026
Marketing - 55% increase in engagement + 10+ hours saved per week.
Customer experience - 160k unique guest comments analyzed, 30 mins from event to insights
Development - 104 pull requests per month in 2025–> 449 in 2026
Two weeks back I headed down to Adelaide for our second year as the Asia-Pacific Industry Venue Congress. I was lucky enough to host a panel with Stefanos VP of Digital Technology at Live Nation, Director of Customer Experience Kat from Melbourne Park, and VP of Product Management Chris from 24/7 Software.
It was unreal to run over how a major promoter, venues and a software company were using AI. All in very different ways but with real results.
The personalization-at-scale problem is basically solved
Stefanos walked us through how Live Nation has moved parts of marketing into automation including tour announcement campaigns end-to-end, audience curation, imagery, copy, SMS personalization. The result were incredible, 55% lift in fan engagement, driven by higher-intent targeting rather than blasting wider.
What that means in practice: marketers aren’t writing individual messages anymore. They’re setting strategy, reviewing outputs, and letting AI handle the execution. It’s not replacing creativity, it’s freeing people up for creativity.
The feedback loop is the real unlock
Kat’s team at Melbourne Park have transformed what they call “Voice of Customer”, basically all the feedback that comes in after events, from a slow, manual process into something genuinely real-time.
We’re talking 160,000+ verbatims being analysed with automated emotion and topic tagging. What used to take two people a week now takes minutes, with 50 staff accessing insights shortly after an event closes.
The operational applications are immediate: if something isn’t working in hospitality during a show run, you know about it fast enough to fix it before the next one. And over time, these insights are informing capital decisions too, seating configurations, cup holders, handrails. Small things that matter to real people.
The teams CSAT scores are improving per event, such is the speed of the adjustments they are making from customer feedback.
The “just ship it” approach to AI features
Chris’s dev team at 24/7 Software have more than tripled their development speed (104 PR’s —> 449 per month) while reducing new feature development from months to weeks.
The challenge has been around getting customer to use their new AI products but the message Chris shared to change it is simple. Stop talking about AI and just share the impact with your customers.
The stuff the audience asked…
What are the guardrails? Consent management, performance dashboards, human review on anything that moves the metrics in unexpected directions. Prompt tuning every few days. Not “set and forget” — active maintenance.
What does this actually cost? Usage-based AI cost models can, without careful scoping, end up exceeding the cost of human labour. The panellists were candid: you need to measure carefully and tie spend directly to outcomes, otherwise you’re just burning money with extra steps.
Who gets left behind? Both staff and audiences. Tools need to be fast, intuitive, and designed in the language your customers actually use — not your internal taxonomy. Onboarding in five minutes or it won’t stick.
The takeaways
AI in live entertainment and venue operations isn’t magic. It’s also not irrelevant hype. It’s a set of genuinely useful tools that, when applied to the right problems with proper architecture and human oversight, compress timelines, improve decisions, and make fans feel more seen.
The organisations pulling ahead are the ones who picked specific outcomes first, then chose the technology to match. Not the other way around.
That’s the frame I’ll keep bringing to this work through CAST, connecting the people building these tools with the organisations who need them, and cutting through the noise to find what will actually make a difference.
